All Spaces have been taken for this tour. I will plan on doing something similar next year. If you are interested in going on a tour before then feel free to contact Drs Foster and Smith directly.

I have been talking with a few folks at live aquaria about several topics and I asked if they would be interested in setting aside one tour day as reef club day. Live Aquaria has opened up 50 spots for us to tour and buy from their facility in Rhinelander, WI on March 21st. This is open to anyone here and your families. What you would need to do to participate is to send me back your email address with a total count of individuals in your group.

My wife Jackee and I will be making this an overnight trip and will be staying at the Jefferson Street Inn in Wausau on the way up. It is a great little place with nice food within walking distance.

Live Aquaria has been very accommodating allowing us to have this date and it is not possible for us to move it to another date. Here is a bit more detail from the team there:__________________Thank you for your interest in attending the upcoming Open House at our Aquaculture Coral & Marine Life Facility on March 21st 2015. This email is to confirm your group is officially registered on our attendance list. We have you schedule to take the tour at 11:30am. We look forward to meeting you then and showing you around.

As a thank you for visiting us, we hope you'll enjoy the following exclusive discounts listed below for our Aquaculture Coral & Marine Life Facility and Retail store.

We will provide free insulated boxes to get your items home safely. Questions? Comments? We welcome your reply.___

When I have done this before you not only go through the facility they also had a raffle with fantastic prizes. I am not sure if that will still be offered but the discounts and ability to see the facility is amazing regardless. I have purchased fish for many years from Live Aquaria and have always been happy. On my last visit there I also walked out with several boxes of coral at great prices to bring home.

What I need from you is your email address and the count of people in your group. If people are interested in car pooling or meeting up along the way we can arrange that in a separate thread. I hope you can make it.

Last edited by drdavis on Thu Feb 19, 2015 1:20 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I would say that going to live aquaria is like visiting 5-10 of your favorite LFS's all at once. My kids when they were that young greatly enjoyed it. All of the fish for sale on divers den are there and maybe 50-100 4ft by 4 ft coral bins. The pet store to me was not that impressive but the live aquarium part put it over the top in my book.

As of right now we have had 25 people sign up to go to Live Aquaria on March 21st. This is across the MARS, WRS and Chicagoreefs boards. Quite a few individuals have posted that they are interested but I have not received PM's for everyone expressing an interest so far.

To be confirmed for the visit you need to send me your email and also give me a total count of people in your group (husband/wife, kids etc.)

For those of you that are confirmed, I have forwarded the first 25 email addresses off to Live Aquaria.

***************Important updateAfter submitting the first round of email addresses I was contacted by Live Aquaria and they need first and last names of everyone who will attend the tour on the 21st. If you already submitted your email to me you should have gotten an email with a similar note directly in your inbox. Please PM me with email address of the primary attendee and the first and last names of anyone in your group that will go through the tour. Sorry for not catching this sooner. We have 20 spots still left for anyone who wants to sign up to go.

I wanted to post a quick update that we are down to our last 10 spots for the tour. The response has been amazing so far and if possible it would be great to fill up these remaining slots. If you are interested in touring Live Aquaria (Divers Den) in Rhinelander please send me the names of everyone that would like to (i.e. name of spouse and children if attending) and your email address and I will add you to the list. There is no cost to go other than your time, gas and any money that you spend during the day :-bd

It is a 3 hour drive for anyone in Madison and they have more coral and fish than I have seen in any one location. IMO this trip is well worth it just to see Kevin Kohen's Acro tank let alone the discounts we are getting from them as well on anything in stock. If you are interested in going please shoot me a PM and I will add you to the list.

You should have received an email from Chris Mueller from Live Aquaria today. It has a Liability Release that needs to be completed for each person in your group on the tour, bring these with you and they will be handed in at the door to the coral farm.

We will check in from 11-12 on the 21st. When you check in make sure that when you get your gift bag that you locate the raffle ticket. They had excellent items on my last visit, don't miss out.

I hope everyone had a great day today that went on the LiveAquaria tour.

We saw that they are modifying the fish and coral culturing facility so that they can bring more fish into the warehouse.

The facility uses ReefCrystals salt and stores pre-made water in 500 gallon tubs above us in this picture. They go through about one pallet of salt per week.

They quarantine all of the coral and fish when they come in.

They have now created a breeding area for certain types of fish and have been successful with some types of clowns.

There coral area is tightly packed with quite a bit of coral

Aside from Kevin Kohen's nice tanks with private specimens of some corals they are always beautiful.

The LA operations manager Steve even had a $3000 fish in his office.

There was some very nice raffle items and I saw a few familar faces walking out with some really nice stuff.

I saw a Vortec and a large UV sterilizer similar to the ones that they actually use.

I also took some random pictures in the warehouse:

We brought home a few animals:*Halloween Urchin*Captive bred pair of blood shrimp*Yellow Angler*Bumblebee Snails

I hope that if we do this again more of you can come next time. If you are interested in booking a trip on your own the Dr. Foster-Smith page has a link for scheduling a tour. Kevin Kohen and Chris Mueller are excellent hosts and do a great job putting on these events.